We’re pleased to announce that a number of Frontier economists have written articles which have been nominated in the Concurrences Antitrust Writing Awards 2021.

The goal of the awards is to shine a light on competition scholarship and to discover the best antitrust content published over the last year.

The two articles that Frontier have been nominated for fall under the “Best Articles: best academic and business articles written by one or a few individual authors” category. You can find a summary of the two articles below.

“Hot air?” explores the question of how antitrust watchdogs might help Europe hit its Green Deal goals. Europe’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, kickstarted a debate about whether competition policy should be doing more to help Europe hit its ambitious Green Deal target of making the continent carbon neutral by 2050. At first sight, competition and environmental policy may appear to be strange bedfellows: one has a laser-like focus on championing the consumer; the other has a brief to save the planet. What steps, if any, could Europe’s antitrust watchdogs be taking to help the continent meet its sustainability objectives? And do proposals that have already been developed by some national competition authorities provide a template for the rest of Europe to follow. To read “Hot air?” in full and vote, click here.

“Interchange fee litigation and the economic analysis of pass-on” considers the potential implications of the UK Supreme Court judgment on appeals relating to competition damages claims brought by Sainsbury’s and other retailers against Mastercard and Visa. The appeals considered the legal framework for the pass-on defence, which had not previously been dealt with substantively under English law. The Supreme Court’s judgment therefore provides potentially important insights into how the issue of pass-on should be considered in competition damages claims: it may suggest some degree of convergence between the legal approaches to pass-on and overcharge analysis, which could potentially lead to greater emphasis on empirical techniques for quantifying pass-on – but legal hurdles are likely to remain. To read  “Interchange fee litigation and the economic analysis of pass-on” and vote, click here.

If you are interested in finding out more about the Concurrences Antitrust Writing Awards, you can visit their website here. Winners will be announced on Wednesday 30 June 2021, during the virtual Antitrust Writing Awards Ceremony.